The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

In her ground-breaking reporting, Naomi Klein introduced the term "disaster capitalism". Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment": losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies.

No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies

No Logo employs journalistic savvy and personal testament to detail the insidious practices and far-reaching effects of corporate marketing—and the powerful potential of a growing activist sect that will surely alter the course of the 21st century. First published before the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, this is an infuriating, inspiring, and altogether pioneering work of cultural criticism that investigates money, marketing, and the anti-corporate movement.

Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire

Bringing together Matt Taibbi's most incisive and hilarious work from his "Road Work" column in Rolling Stone, Smells Like Dead Elephants shines an unflinching spotlight on the corruption, dishonesty, and sheer laziness of our leaders.

Wages of Rebellion

Revolutions come in waves and cycles. We are again riding the crest of a revolutionary epic, much like 1848 or 1917, from the Arab Spring to movements against austerity in Greece to the Occupy movement. In Wages of Rebellion, Chris Hedges - who has chronicled the malaise and sickness of a society in terminal moral decline in his books Empire of Illusion and Death of the Liberal Class - investigates what social and psychological factors cause revolution, rebellion, and resistance.

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population doubles. Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world’s wealth. The rich get massively richer. No one goes to jail. In search of a solution, journalist Matt Taibbi discovered the Divide, the seam in American life where our two most troubling trends - growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration - come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now determined by our wealth or poverty.

Social Security Works!: Why Social Security Isn't Going Broke and How Expanding It Will Help Us All

A growing chorus of prominent voices in Congress and elsewhere are calling for the expansion of our Social Security system - people who know that Social Security will not "go broke" and does not add a penny to the national debt. Social Security Works! will amplify these voices and offer a powerful antidote to the three-decade-long, billionaire-funded campaign to make us believe that this vital institution is destined to collapse. It isn't.

Over the past three years, the notorious @GSElevator Twitter feed has offered a hilarious, shamelessly voyeuristic look into the real world of international finance. Hundreds of thousands followed the account, Goldman Sachs launched an internal investigation, and when the true identity of the man behind it all was revealed, it created a national media sensation - but that's only part of the story.

The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America - and What We Can Do to Stop It

The United States is more vulnerable today than ever before - including during the Great Depression and the Civil War - because the pillars of democracy that once supported a booming middle class have been corrupted, and without them, America teeters on the verge of the next Great Crash. The United States is in the midst of an economic implosion that could make the Great Depression look like child's play.

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

Conventional wisdom holds that America has been a Christian nation since the Founding Fathers. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse argues that the idea of "Christian America" is nothing more than a myth - and a relatively recent one at that.

The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power

From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy. Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism. But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished. Why? The Age of Acquiescence seeks to solve that mystery.

The Secret History of the American Empire

In The Secret History of the American Empire, Perkins zeroes in on hot spots around the world and, drawing on interviews with other hit men, jackals, reporters, and activists, examines the current geopolitical crisis. Instability is the norm; it's clear that the world we've created is dangerous and no longer sustainable. How did we get here? Who's responsible? What good have we done and at what cost? And what can we do to change things for the next generations?

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories.

On Anarchism

On Anarchism provides the reasoning behind Noam Chomsky's fearless lifelong questioning of the legitimacy of entrenched power. In these essays, Chomsky redeems one of the most maligned ideologies, anarchism, and places it at the foundation of his political thinking. Chomsky's anarchism is distinctly optimistic and egalitarian. Moreover, it is a living, evolving tradition that is situated in a historical lineage; Chomsky's anarchism emphasizes the power of collective, rather than individualist, action.

A major new collection from "arguably the most important intellectual alive" (The New York Times). Noam Chomsky is universally accepted as one of the preeminent public intellectuals of the modern era. Over the past thirty years, broadly diverse audiences have gathered to attend his sold-out lectures. Now, in Understanding Power, Peter Mitchell and John Schoeffel have assembled the best of Chomsky's recent talks on the past, present, and future of the politics of power.

Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

Ever since 9/11 America has fought an endless war on terror, seeking enemies everywhere and never promising peace. In Pay Any Price, James Risen reveals an extraordinary litany of the hidden costs of that war: from squandered and stolen dollars, to outrageous abuses of power, to wars on normalcy, decency, and truth. In the name of fighting terrorism, our government has done things every bit as shameful as its historic wartime abuses - and until this audiobook, it has worked very hard to cover them up.

John L. Moncrief says:"If you care about our liberties, read this book."

Capitalism v. Democracy offers the key to understanding why corporations are now citizens, money is political speech, limits on corporate spending are a form of censorship, democracy is a free market, and political equality and democratic integrity are unconstitutional constraints on money in politics. Supreme Court opinions have dictated these conditions in the name of the Constitution, as though the Constitution itself required the privatization of democracy.

Hopes and Prospects

In this urgent new book, Noam Chomsky examines the dangers and prospects of our early 21st century. Exploring challenges such as the growing gap between North and South, American exceptionalism (including under President Obama), the fiascos of Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S.-Israeli assault on Gaza, and the recent recent financial bailouts, he also sees hope for the future. Chomsky surveys the democratic wave in Latin America and the growing global solidarity movements.

Deniers of climate change sometimes quip that claims about global warming are more about political science than climate science. They are wrong on the science, but may be right with respect to its political implications. A hotter world, writes Andrew Guzman, will bring unprecedented migrations, famine, war, and disease. It will be a social and political disaster of the first order.

Most of us recognize that climate change is real, and yet we do nothing to stop it. What is this psychological mechanism that allows us to know something is true but act as if it is not? George Marshall's search for the answers brings him face to face with Nobel Prize-winning psychologists and the activists of the Texas Tea Party; the world's leading climate scientists and the people who denounce them; liberal environmentalists and conservative evangelicals.

The Essential Chomsky

In a single volume, the seminal writings of the world's leading philosopher, linguist, and critic, published to coincide with his 80th birthday. For the past 40 years Noam Chomsky's writings on politics and language have established him as a preeminent public intellectual and as one of the most original and wide-ranging political and social critics of our time. Among the seminal figures in linguistic theory over the past century, since the 1960s Chomsky has also secured a place as perhaps the leading dissident voice in the United States.

Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs

Americans are taught to believe that upward mobility is possible for anyone who is willing to work hard, regardless of their social status. Yet it is often those from affluent backgrounds who land the best jobs. Pedigree takes listeners behind the closed doors of top-tier investment banks, consulting firms, and law firms to reveal the truth about who really gets hired for the nation's highest-paying entry-level jobs, who doesn't, and why.

All the Presidents' Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power

Nomi Prins ushers us into the intimate world of exclusive clubs, vacation spots, and Ivy League universities that binds presidents and financiers. She unravels the multi-generational blood, intermarriage, and protégé relationships that have confined national influence to a privileged cluster of people. This unprecedented history of American power illuminates how financiers have retained their authoritative position through history, swaying presidents regardless of party affiliation.

Death of the Liberal Class

Chris Hedges examines the failure of the liberal class to confront the rise of the corporate state and the consequences of a liberalism that has become profoundly bankrupted. Hedges argues that there are five pillars of the liberal establishment and that each of these institutions has sold out the constituents it represented. In doing so, the liberal class has become irrelevant to society at large and ultimately the corporate power elite they once served.

Revolution

You have been lied to, told there's no alternative, no choice, and that you don’t deserve any better. Brand destroys this illusory facade as amusingly and deftly as he annihilates Morning Joe anchors, Fox News fascists, and BBC stalwarts. This audiobook makes revolution not only possible but inevitable and fun.

Publisher's Summary

In her ground-breaking reporting, Naomi Klein introduced the term "disaster capitalism". Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment": losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers.

The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in many parts of the world, from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia and Iraq.

At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization, combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. Klein argues that by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for 50 years.

The book is extremely well researched and well referenced. You don't get that from the audio book but the hard copy has pages and pages of references with every assertion being footnoted and linked to the original information source. The Shock Doctrine is very factual, hard-hitting, and packed with information you won't get from the sterilized, "politically-correct" and controversy-free mainstream and thus will be hard to swallow for those used to being brainwashed. It is a must read (not just listen) for everyone considering themselves a free thinker. If you are only getting the book on audio, I would strongly recommend the unabridged version.

Well, wonderful. Everybody is praising Naomi for her great work. After you're all done congratulating her, don't forget to dig in and get to work. Make sure everybody you know listens to this book. If only half of what she says is correct, then we are the evil empire. The evils done to the citizens of Iraq dwarf anything Hollywood can ever come up with. I am still conservative. But we need to get the spending power out of the hands of the Federal Government. We need to replace congress with men of courage and integrity who refuse funding from special interests.
Please don't say depressing, this book is infuriating and motivating. We can't afford to be depressed.

I loved this book, I thought I knew all the evils of Iraq and had read it all but this book took me further down the rabbit hole plus gives other example of how war and chaos are artificially manufactured to create the shock that allows leaders to manipulate the populace to warped capitalistic theories.

While reductive by the standards of scholarly argument, this powerful polemic tempts me to "must-read" hyperbole. Klein uses the analogy of psychological shock therapy to chronicle the rise, since the 1970s, of the economic "shock therapy" (their phrase!) advocated by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School. Sounds contrived and conspiricist, but isn't. This is well reported and argued. Klein's first point is that the Chicago School's free market "counter-revolution" has never arisen naturally by democratic means. It has been foisted upon countries, from Chile to Russia, only at opportune moments of disaster, then sustained through violent state action, usually abeted by the same inner ring of U.S. contractors and advisors. Her evidence, while not comprehensive by academic standards, is wholly convincing in its demonstration of repeated patterns and key players. In every case, the result has been a disaster made deadlier by economic ideology, ground-level mismanagement, and high-level corporate looting. This grim market logic culminates in Iraq with the Bush administration's systematic dismantling of government functions to be replaced by corporations and start-ups free to operate outside of legislative, judicial, or even market constraints. Work that local companies might have done, American companies utterly fail to do at ten times the cost, then pocket their billions, shrug, and move on. This is the economic analysis of the Iraq war that has been frustratingly absent in public debate. It is made all the more coherent by Klein's larger historical context. Worse, under Bush all of this is becoming deeply institutionalized. Large sectors of our economy are coming to depend on a "new frontier" of political and natural catastrophes, terror security chief among them. This important, eye-opening work is is also very well narrated here. One of the most worthwhile audio book I've bought. And no, I am neither friend nor relative nor ideologue, just newly won admirer.

One of the most eye opening books I've read in my life. Having just read Atlas Shrugged, a very philosophically pro-capitalist book, it was very insightful to hear about the flaws within an idea which enjoys overwhelming support in the United States. Our addiction to capitalism comes at a cost, and this book examines the line between capitalism and morality that we seek to walk. Extremely well written and researched, the writer connects the dots from the CIA mind control experiments in the 50s to U.S. funded Pinochet takeover of Chile, to the Yeltsin takeover of Russia, to the desecration of the Iraqi economy, to the pro counter-terrorist modern state of Israel. Definitely an eye opener and highly recommended.

Klein gives the reader a lens through which the world looks strikingly different and in an eerie way makes sense. Her analysis of free market economics and its role in the brutal transformation of nations certainly has its biases. Critics will parse details to finesse deniability, but her over arching paradigm has the ring of truth. As you read reality races towards you from all quarters screaming, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Privatization, globalization and the dawning of a world suffocating on terror, staggering from one disaster to another, is the undeniable backdrop of our present reality. Klein shows how these have become the engine driving social disparities of a feudal order. She also makes a strong case for the self-perpetuating nature of these forces. Disasters are incredible opportunities for coporatists to make enormous profits with public money. Corporations fund politicians. Therefore disasters continue because there is no political will to attempt to prevent them. The people - the ordinary working class people - suffer. The rich get richer. The world becomes less safe. Fear fumigates the very air we breathe. What’s worse the free market push for privatization has begun to hollow out the public infrastructure. And the private sector has in essence scammed the people’s treasuries. Klein’s detailed examples and cogent, logical progression draws the reader in. Her matter-of-fact, straightforward style is like a breath of fresh air. The Shock Doctrine is a stunning read!

Once you will read this book you will enjoy the understanding of what is going on right now between the IMF & PIGS countries ( Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain).
you will be able to predict the next move of the Chicago boys in regards to the future of these countries...

This book is depressing, but needed. I was impressed by the amount of research the author put into this work. With every chapter I can see the reality of what we hear, or should I say what we don't hear, in our daily news.

The reality of the political elite have messed with our minds and our citizens. The degradation caused by this administration spreads to the rest of the world as it was a very large supermarket with humans as commodities.

I appreciated this honest and factual account of the state of economics and human suffering.

I am better for the knowledge to make informed judgments when I go to the voting booth.

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